Vladimir Yankilevsky

Moscow, 1988. House of Architects, Graphics by Vladimir Yankilevsky
New York; San Francisco, 1988. Eduard Nakhamkin Fine Arts, Retrospective: Vladimir Yankilevsky

Vladimir Yankilevsky. Moment of Eternity, St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2007, exhibition catalogue, p. 31

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A major Soviet nonconformist artist, Vladimir Yankilevsky has created a stunningly diverse and complex body of work. It encompasses enormous relief sculptures, huge triptychs, easel-size paintings, and a variety of works in the graphic arts. Subjects range from the representational to the non-objective, the mundane to the scatological, and the normal to the monstrous. Some underlying themes include the resolution of opposites, the conflict between individuals and technology, and the quest for balance between what the artist terms masculine and feminine principles.

Yankilevsky sees the world as divided into two fundamental principles: masculine and feminine. The masculine principle is dynamic, unstable, and generally represented in profile, while the feminine principle, depicted frontally, embodies stability and provides a setting for the active (male) forces. These principles complement each other and are present in every individual, male or female.

Yankilevsky received his initial artistic training at the Moscow Secondary Art School, where he studied from 1950 to 1956. However, he found academic training rather conservative and limiting. In 1956, he saw a Picasso exhibition in Moscow which played a major role in his development. He started working as a book illustrator, and in 1957 he was admitted into the art department of the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. While at the Institute, Yankilevsky took classes with the experimental artist Eli Beliutin, the first artist to teach Abstract Expressionism in the Soviet Union, Beliutin was eventually forced to resign from the Institute in 1958.

In 1965, Yankilevsky had a one-man show at the Biophysics Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, but the exhibition was closed by the Soviet authorities after just one night.  Two other solo exhibitions that same year, at the Dubna Science Center and in the Protvino Science Center, were also banned.

Yankilevsky finally became a member of the Artists' Union in 1980, after having been denied membership in 1971. In 1990 he moved to New York and in 1992 relocated to Paris.

Some of Yankilevsky's works, such as those belonging to the cycle The Space of Experience, executed during the late 1980s, reflect the artist's concern with creating a sense of a continuum between individual objects and the cosmos.

Yankilevsky explains: "The interplay of forces in the space of the world finds its reflection in human physiology and psychology. My compositions which I call 'space of experience,' are a certain image of this interplay of forces, though this image is not physical or mathematical, but anthropomorphic. I want to render the interplay of these forces visible through human experience. In this sense, these 'abstract' compositions are actually dramatizations. In my collages, they provide a backdrop for the human figure, which also takes the form of 'world energies,' though now as a farce or parody... Each time, holes and rapture literally implied the possibility for negating the illusory idea of the world as something complete."